“You were saying, Mr. Sita Ram?”
But Mr. Sita Ram’s first fine careless rapture had evaporated. “I was rereading some of de works of Morley today,” he announced.
“Golly!” said Philip Quarles, who liked on occasion, very deliberately, to bring out a piece of schoolboy slang. It made such an effect in the middle of a serious conversation.
But Mr. Sita Ram could hardly be expected to catch the full significance of that “Golly.” “What a tinker!” he pursued. “What a great tinker! And de style is so chaste.”
“I suppose it is.”
“Dere are some good phrases,” Mr. Sita Ram went on. “I wrote dem down.” He searched his pockets, but failed to discover his notebook. “Never mind,” he said. “But dey were good phrases. Sometimes one reads a whole book widout finding a single phrase one can remember or quote. What’s de good of such a book, I ask you?”
“What indeed?”
Four or five untidy servants came out of the house and changed the plates. A dish of dubious rissoles made its appearance. Elinor glanced despairingly at her husband, then turned to Mr. Sita Ram to assure him that she never ate meat. Himself stoically eating, Philip approved her wisdom. They drank sweet champagne that was nearly as warm as tea. The rissoles were succeeded by sweetmeats—large, pale balls (much fingered, one felt sure, long and lovingly rolled between the palms) or some equivocal substance, at once slimy and gritty, and tasting hauntingly through their sweetness of mutton fat.
Under the influence of the champagne, Mr. Sita Ram recovered his eloquence. His latest oration re-uttered itself.
“Dere is one law for de English,” he said, “and anoder for de Indians, one for de oppressors and anoder for de oppressed. De word justice has eider disappeared from your vocab’lary, or else it has changed its meaning.”
“I’m inclined to think that it has changed its meaning,” said Philip.
Mr. Sita Ram paid no attention. He was filled with a sacred indignation, the more violent for being so hopelessly impotent. “Consider de case,” he went on (and his voice trembled out of his control), “of de unfortunate station master of Bhowanipore.”
But Philip refused to consider it. He was thinking of the way in which the word justice changes its meaning. Justice for India had meant one thing before he visited the country. It meant something very different now, when he was on the point of leaving it.
The station master of Bhowanipore, it appeared, had had a spotless record and nine children.
“But why don’t you teach them birth control, Mr. Sita Ram?” Elinor had asked. These descriptions of enormous families always made her wince. She remembered what she had suffered when little Phil was born. And after all, she had had choloroform and two nurses and Sir Claude Aglet. Whereas the wife of the station master of Bhowanipore … She had heard accounts of Indian midwives. She shuddered. “Isn’t it the only hope for India?”
Mr. Sita Ram, however, thought that the only hope was universal suffrage and self-government. He went on with the station master’s history. The man had passed all his examinations with credit; his qualifications were the highest possible. And yet he had been passed over for promotion no less than four times. Four times, and always in favour of Europeans or Eurasians. Mr. Sita Ram’s blood boiled when he thought of the five thousand years of Indian civilization, Indian spirituality, Indian moral superiority, cynically trampled, in the person of the station master of Bhowanipore, under English feet.
“Is dat justice, I ask?” he banged the table.
Who knows? Philip wondered. Perhaps it is.
Elinor was still thinking of the nine children. To obtain a quick delivery, the midwives, she had heard, stamp on their patients. And, instead of ergot, they use a paste made of cow dung and powdered glass.
“Do you call dat justice?” Mr. Sita Ram repeated.
Realizing that he was expected to make some response, Philip shook his head and said, no.
“You ought to write about it,” said Mr. Sita Ram. “You ought to show de scandal up.”
Philip excused himself; he was only a writer of novels, not a politician, not a journalist. “Do you know old Daulat Singh?” he added with apparent irrelevance. “The one who lives at Ajmere?”
“I have met de man,” said Mr. Sita Ram, in a tone that made it quite clear that he didn’t like Daulat Singh or perhaps (more probably, thought Philip) hadn’t been liked or approved by him.
“A fine man, I thought,” said Philip. For men like Daulat Singh justice would have to mean something very different from what it meant for Mr. Sita Ram or the station master of Bhowanipore. He remembered the noble old face, the bright eyes, the restrained passion of his words. If only he could have refrained from chewing pan. …
The time came for them to go. At last. They said goodbye with an almost excessive cordiality, climbed into the waiting car, and were driven away. The ground beneath the palm trees of Joohoo was littered with a mintage of shining silver, splashed with puddles of mercury. They rolled through a continuous flickering of light and dark—the cinema film of twenty years ago—until, emerging from under the palm trees, they found themselves in the full glare of the enormous moon.
“Three-formed Hecate,” he thought, blinking at the round brilliance. “But what about Sita Ram and Daulat Singh and the station master? what about old appalling India?
